Beverages are great antennas for listening, monitoring, and getting a rough bearing on where a signal is emanating.
Check out these great posts from Thomas over at SWLing Post:
11 thoughts on “A Neat Read on Beverage Antennas”
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Beverages are great antennas for listening, monitoring, and getting a rough bearing on where a signal is emanating.
Check out these great posts from Thomas over at SWLing Post:
Comments are closed.
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Interesting to note that the BBC was using Beverage antennas at 15-18 mHz, and found at those frequencies they got better directivity with a lower antenna. These Beverages were very long for these frequencies- over 10 wavelengths long.
Typically, there is a sweet spot at a given height where the directivity is a max, and it is usually much shorter than 10 wavelengths. I’ve had outstanding success with Beverages about 800′ long. I’m also looking into some of the double flag antennas, too.
Keypounder
So glad you’re commenting on this. 🙂
If you could send (if you still have) a copy of the article you did for Sparks, I’d very much love to run it.
I’ve had good success with a Beverage Antenna on the AM band.
They don’t have to that straight as long as the last third points at your target.
Mine was a direct connection why did you link with a ferrite coupling ?
That’s not my diagram, it was taken from a fellow op and avid SWLer. The first couple links are to his results, not mine. But in a high RF environment, which he may well be in, a ferrite will isolate noise.
Yup, the issue is that the outside of the transmission line itself will act as an antenna, and can destroy the directionality of the Beverage, so common mode decoupling and chokes are highly desirable for best performance. See Devoldere’s “Low Band Dxing” for ALL the skinny on Beverages!
I use binocular core transformers at the feedpoint, where the branch coax connects to the main feed back to the shack, and I use common mode chokes where the feedpoint enters the shack. A good test is to disconnect the antenna and see what you hear. If you still get signals you need more decoupling.
Receive only? Not transmit with an antenna tuner between the Beverage (and balun) and the radio?
Seems to me at one time I remember seeing diagrams of a Beverage style antenna, elevated at the fed end, close to ground at the distant end, fed with ladder line, terminated, with two legs, extremely long and VERY directional (between the two legs), used for HF transmit (and receive, natch).
Yes, for listening.
Deplorable:
Beverages are indeed for listening; they are very inefficient for transmit, although this has been done.
What you are thinking of is the terminated V-Beam, a variant of the Rhombic. See the Antenna Handbook for more information.
Thank you. I couldn’t think of the name at the time. I think I’ve heard it called a half-Rhombic, too.
Very cool, DX Engineering has some cool kits to include essentially preamps and bi-directional switches. I plan to build one on some rural land I have this spring, I’ll need my 50 acres to find a spot to run 300+ foot wires!